Euthanasia
Trial Verdict Wrong on all Counts
Sunday Star Times(NZ),
11 April 2004 By Frank Haden
Lesley Martin was found guilty by a set of provincial jurors
whose verdict reflected the conservative outlook of rural New
Zealand.
The Wanganui jurors' verdict was wrong, a slap in the face
for humanitarian concern for suffering fellow creatures. Would
there have been a different result had her case been transferred
to the High Court in Wellington and heard by a metropolitan
jury?
Martin was charged with being compassionate. She found no compassion
in the jury that passed judgment.
In her book To Die Like a Dog she had flung down her challenge
to outdated beliefs, and she paid the price for her temerity.
Since there was no justice in the jury's verdict, though it
was within the law as it stands, it is now up to Justice Wild
to restore equity by discharging her without conviction when
he considers her sentencing. His record as a wise, compassionate
judge gives every hope that he will do so.
The regressive forces of religious prejudice, declaiming from
the lofty pedestals of their ignorance that "only God has
the right to end life", will be outraged if he does. They
will thrust their superstitious "Thou shalt not" prohibitions
into Justice Wild's face, and into the public's face, demanding
the supremacy of the Ten Commandments be endorsed, no matter
what suffering they cause.
Equally furious will be the supporters of the view that bad
law must be upheld just because it is the law, no matter how
much evidence shows it is long past its use-by date. The repeal
of bad law comes about through public opinion change. Martin's
book is taking a leading role in applying pressure to have an
antiquated, inhumane, superstitious ban on allowing patients
facing an inevitable slow, agonising death to have the suffering
relieved so they can "go gentle into that good night"
of painless oblivion.
One of those public opinion polls we're always being told about
ought to ask its guinea-pig audience: "Should a person
in the last stages of cancer, when morphine has ceased to relieve
or even mask intolerable pain, be condemned by the law to tough
it out, to scream their days through till they die from natural
causes?"
There's no doubt which way the vote would go in answering a
question put in those terms. Make no mistake: Whatever the well-intentioned
people of the hospice movement may say, morphine does not provide
relief when pain becomes massive, as it does in the final stages
of most cancers. We should not expect anything else, when we
consider the merciless way the multiplying rogue cells eat away
at their host's nerve-laden tissue and bone.
It is unfortunate when palliative care doctors say there is
no reason for patients to suffer, and there is nothing inevitable
about pain at the end of life. It's inevitable all right. Ask
doctors who can be relied on for a straight answer. They will
tell you morphine's effectiveness comes and goes.
Even when doctors have decided to give overdoses of morphine
with the nominal intention of relieving pain but with the unspoken
object of ending an intolerable life, it can take days for the
patient to reach the longed-for end.
The Martin trial jurors, when they reflect on their verdict,
may recall what the prosecutor said at the start of the trial.
He set them off on the wrong foot when he told them it made
no difference whether or not Martin's mother asked her to end
her life. In other words, the suffering of the dying woman,
her agonised pleas for release, were of no account. The letter
of the law, with all its faults, had to be observed.
Martin was required by the antiquated legislation to shut her
ears to her mother's groans. She had to say, no matter what
it cost her in denying her natural instincts as a loving daughter:
"Sorry, Mum, but I'm not allowed to do anything to help.
You'll just have to grin and bear it. The priests and the parsons,
like Shylock, demand their pound of flesh from the law. And
the self-centred fools who fill Parliament back them up."
All the claptrap that occupied the 13 days of the trial, as
lawyers argued loftily about whether or not Martin had enough
politically correct "support" in looking after her
mother, whether she had a clear recollection of events and what
she said to police, was irrelevant.
The bottom line is Martin promised her mother she would not
let her die slowly and painfully, then sought to comply with
her mother's request for an end to her suffering.
That cannot be any sort of crime.
(c) Fairfax New Zealand Ltd 2004 reproduced courtesy of Sunday
Star-Times
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